“Well, we should fetch it and get comfortable. This is not a short story. You’ll want to make yourself something too. Perhaps we should order some food. Arthur can pop into the restaurant downstairs for us and bring something up. They do an exquisite steak. I’ll call him. You get the drinks and settle in the salon. You can bring the painting. She comes easily off the wall.”
“She?”
Stella’s laugh fills the small space. “I have always thought of it as an incredibly feminine painting, perhaps because Vincent had meant to paint female models the day that he made these and the form was still in his imagination. I have always referred to her as a she.”
I wait to ask my questions and lift the painting off the wall. She’s much heavier than I expected. The subject matter makes it appear so light, but the worn wooden frame is formidable and the canvas is thick. It feels wrong, illicit, to be moving the painting around; Stella seems to read my mind. “We are all so trained to find the art untouchable. Let’s go enjoy her for a while. It’s been some time since I’ve brought her out.”
Stella leaves the room first. A light breeze whisks the fallen papers across the carpet. I step on one and hear it tear slightly. I can’t just leave everything like this. I place the painting safely on the ground and begin the work of tidying up the small room enough that Stella won’t return to find a carpet covered in random documents. As I’m shuffling them into an acceptable pile, a prominent seal and logo on top of one of the pages catches my eye.
“Emma.” Stella calls from the other room with no small sense of urgency.
“Coming,” I shout. As I quickly scan the page, my legs go rubbery. I have to sit back down.
Her fluttery footsteps are returning to the dressing room.
“I’ll be right there. Meet you in the sitting room,” I yell to deter her.
I carefully fold the paper into quarters and slip it into the back pocket of my jeans.
In the sitting room, I perch the painting on the top of an antique piano and once it’s leaning against the wall it feels exactly right. The yellow flowers on their blue background, with the addition of the tangerine frame behind them, create the right contrast with the nearly black walls, and I’m proud of myself forpositioning it just so as I go into the kitchen to add new ice cubes to Stella’s drink and to fix my own.
When I return, she’s already on the sofa, clad in bright blue silk pajamas that match the background of the painting, and I know that it’s on purpose. I hand her the drink. She takes a sip and makes a face. “Weak.”
“Do you want more?”
“Obviously.”
I return to the kitchen and add another splash to both of our glasses.
“Better?” I ask when I return.
“Much.” She smiles at me. “You seem to know enough about the history of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings to know what this is?”
I nod. I also know that one of these paintings,Fifteen Sunflowers, sold at auction with Christie’s in 1987 for more than $25 million.
“When I look at this painting, at any of the Sunflowers paintings, I see the entire circle of life,” Stella says. “Vincent didn’t only pick the most beautiful and vibrant flowers to paint. He combined all stages of a sunflower’s life in a single vase from bud to wilting petals. We are all in there, from the newborn baby to the invisible older woman.”
I had honestly never thought of them that way, but now I see the buds, the dead petals, and everything in between. “But there’s something else in this one,” I note. Because behind the vase is a window and in the reflection of the glass is Vincent painting the flowers. This isn’t just a still life. It’s also a self-portrait.
“You have a keen eye, my dear. In this painting he combined the iconic flowers that he hoped would become his signature with his own gaze.”
“But, Stella, how did you end up with this?”
“Right. Right. Back on track. My grandmother was French. She was literally born on the street in Montmartre. As she put it,her own mother didn’t even know she was pregnant and when the time came she squatted in the gutter to relieve herself only to discover a baby between her legs. I don’t know how true that is, but Grandmother never wavered when she told it. She was raised by the sisters of the Sacré-Coeur in an orphanage for her first eight years, but then found herself on her own on the streets. She eventually turned to prostitution to make a living before she made the acquaintance of Jo van Gogh.”
Stella pauses, sips, and watches me as I take this improbable information in. I allow my jaw to drop, but I nod for her to keep going.
“It was shortly after Jo’s husband, Theo, had passed away that my grandmother Claire became friendly with Jo. She helped her keep her house and took care of her young son, Vincent. When Theo van Gogh died he left his wife with hundreds of worthless paintings and sketches by his brother. Jo had to make something of them. She had to convince the art world that Vincent was something special to make money in order to survive. She organized shows, courted critics. My grandmother helped her, and because of it, Jo gifted her several paintings.”
“That seems extravagant.”
“Not at all. They were considered worthless at the time that Theo died, and even though she changed that when she gave them to my grandmother, they weren’t worth the fortunes they are today. She told my grandmother to keep them as long as she could and sell them if she ever found herself in dire straits again. They were her insurance policy, or so I was told. And that’s how this was passed to me. The last of them. There are letters proving all of this.”
My brain is spinning and I don’t know what to ask first.
“Letters? Here?”
“No,” she says, her voice trembling.
